Systemd 245 Shipping Soon With Systemd-Homed, Systemd-Repart Partitioner

Written by Michael Larabel in systemd on 5 February 2020 at 07:22 AM EST. 112 Comments
SYSTEMD
Systemd 245 is soon shipping as the first feature update of 2020 and it's another big one.

Most notable with systemd 245 is the introduction of systemd-homed for reimagining how Linux home directories are managed and modernizing them. Systemd-homed allows for better handling password and encryption management, better self-containment and migratable, and other improvements. Expect systemd-homed to continue to be expanded upon in future releases. As part of systemd-homed are other new features that are related like the systemd "userdb" bits for supporting rich user and group records in a JSON format.

Systemd 245 is also bringing systemd-repart as a declarative repartitioner for GPT partition tables. The intended use-case for systemd-repart is expanding minimized operating system images and where new partitions may be created on first boot. Systemd-repart can only add and grow partitions but not delete, shrink, or move partitions.

Systemd 245 also makes systemd-journald multi-instantiable, a number of new network features in systemd-networkd, new SD-BUS APIs, systemd-growfs can now grow XFS partitions, systemd-cryptsetup can now unlock encrypted volumes by the likes of YubiKeys, a new per-service sandboxing option for preventing write access to the system clock, and a number of other additions.

Systemd 245 RC1 is available for testing this morning on GitHub.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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